Several people have tried to point out the inconsistency of your hatred and fear of government, against your acceptance of the concentration of power in business. Concentration of power is concentration of power, and it's angels dancing on the head of a pin time to try to draw any distinction between government power and business power.

Not really. The analysis is quite simple, but like a lot of simple answers, people don't like them because they aren't the answers they want to hear.

The criteria for abuse of power is the use of force. Governments tend to do this more often because, in the proper nature of a government, they have legal access to force, and it's obviously easier to abuse something if you have ready access to it.

Ideally, private businesses aren't supposed to have access to this kind of force, but obviously in the real world they do, usually by influencing the government force infrastructure to do their bidding. When a company lobbies to get special tax treatment unavailable to their competitors, or to create regulations that hamper their competition but not themselves, they are abusing power. I am against this as much as I am against abuse of government power on its own.

Ironically, this kind of abuse seems to be perfectly legal, and goes on all the time, while things like anti-trust are pursued vigorously. Go figure.

However, many people seem to see sheer size of a business as suspect, no matter how that business operates, or whether or not it has competition. This is not a good criteria on its own. Simply occupying a large section of a market is not in itself a crime, unless force (usually some form of government regulation that bites smaller outfits harder than larger ones) is used to prevent competition.

As for inconsistency, liberals have a few of their own, including a hostility for large corporations, but a perfect willingness to turn over every aspect of their health care to the State. The belief that somehow we have more influence over Federal bureaucrats than we do CEOs is naive.

You are, of course, correct that politics has always been part of human behavior. It does seem, though, that the average American used to be able to live more of their lives without having to consider the views of the Federal government in every aspect of their existence. Pournelle said it used to be more important who was your mayor than who was President.

My own theory is that part of the problem with the American presidency is that, given the huge increase in the power of national government, we no longer vote for just one executive in one part of a broad range of levels of government. We're voting for an emperor.